MWC14 Device SoC Count: Qualcomm, Intel and MediaTek Dominate

So, I walked around Mobile World Congress last week and made sure that I visited all of the important booths and met with all of the major SoC vendors. Obviously, I wasn’t alone in doing so, but there were a few other people that did the same thing. One of those people was Patrick Moorhead of Moor Insights & Strategy who actually collected real world data on who was in what devices and where.

As you can tell from the above table, there is no doubt that Qualcomm took the lead in commercially available devices. What’s even more interesting is how much closer Intel has come to Qualcomm. Sure, Intel and MediaTek together come still come nowhere near Qualcomm in terms of shipping devices at the show… But, Intel was actually showing more devices than MediaTek was, which is fairly interesting because MediaTek is supposedly the #2 SoC vendor to Android device makers. What’s really depressing, however, is the lack of Nvidia devices on this list as they really didn’t have many devices out there on the show floor and the ones that I did get a chance to see were literally two. You can probably count the amount of Tegra-based devices on a single hand, the same can probably be said about Broadcom, who was also not mentioned.

Both companies are struggling to be relevant SoC vendors in the mobile market and have recently shipped some of their own integrated LTE solutions. Both Nvidia and Broadcom are in difficult positions and may likely be relegated to the value segments unless they can attain similar feature sets as their other competitors. Mediatek isn’t necessarily considered the performance leader in smartphones or tablets, but Nvidia and Broadcom are still in limbo. Either way, it is a shame not to see these companies listed due to not shipping in many devices. Hopefully 2014 will change that for them and will give the three companies listed above some competition.